Another day, another Arcana. The newest Unearthed Arcana recently dropped, so let’s talk about it. This new installment has stepped away from the subclasses they’ve been doing lately, instead focusing on options that everyone can employ. Let’s dive in and look at the new spells and tattoos.
There are two new spells in this update that are very useful, though not particularly exciting. Acid Stream and Spirit Shroud are excellent spells that may even need tuning down. They are not quite as exciting as the other spells. They’re summoning spells, done right! They’ve made some big design improvements to take a load off the DM. First off, each spell comes with a template to design your summoned creature. For players, this means you can make the creature whatever you wish. For DMs, this means you won’t have to go rooting through the monster manual every time your players want to summon something. The other major improvement is upcasting. With previous summoning spells you’d summon more creatures if you cast at a higher level. This made combat a slog as each creature had to take its turn. These new spells scale directly with levels, which makes creatures feel powerful without bogging down combat. Overall, these spells are a great new direction for summons to go.
The other half of this Arcana is particularly interesting. This part outlines magical tattoos. These are designed interestingly, in that the tattoo part of them is all flavor. Granted, it’s awesome flavor, but you could definitely imagine these as magical items and it would still make sense. This issue is exacerbated by how the tattoos can be attuned and removed at will, allowing them to be swapped with others at will. I would like to see this changed to a more permanent option, at least in terms of being able to trade it to other players. I could see this being a fun and unique upgrade to characters, but I would perhaps tweak the power and permanence of these tattoos to make them stand out.
There are certainly some interesting additions in this Unearthed Arcana. It seems that this is setting up some foundations to build on in the future, and they are some solid ones at that. You can check out the specifics of this update here. What do you think of the new Arcana? What tattoo would you get? Let me know down below!
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